The Vienna Secession: A Major Leap Forward In The History of Art
It was time to reject the past and embrace the future
“The future is blooming all around us; but we are still rooted in the past”, lamented the Viennese writer Hermann Bahr in 1891. It was a sentiment shared by many of the artists who congregated in Vienna at this time.
While the public life of the city remained staunchly conservative, a new avant-garde emerged whose aim was to broaden the narrow 19th-century approaches to painting, architecture and design. If they had no common philosophy behind them, they were united in their desire to find an alternative to the reactionary Künstlerhaus (the Society of Artists), who owned the city’s only exhibition hall. And it was from this desire that the Secession was born, propelling Viennese art into the modern world.
The ideas behind the Secession were first born in the coffee-houses of Vienna, which provided an environment quite different to the stifling academicism of the Künstlerhaus. Here artists, writers, musicians and philosophers could meet freely, discuss alternatives to the staid conventions of naturalism, or ways of replacing the traditional barriers between fine and applied art.
At the Café Zum Blauen Freihaus, artists Josef Engelhart and Johann Krämer met, both of whom…
